


Projections

by ellen_fremedon



Category: Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delany
Genre: Chromatic Source, Linguistics, Multi, Space Opera, canonical threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2011-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-27 17:20:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/298196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/pseuds/ellen_fremedon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mollya learns to talk to her crewmates.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Projections

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jain/gifts).



> Thank you to Twistedchick and Sanj for beta.

Twist, duck, let the chiseled youth describe a path through space, hurtling into a fall through his own inertia.  "Another?"

"Two out of three," the boy agreed. Mollya offered Ron a hand up and thought of geometry, English words unfurling from the personafix's careful vocabulary and imposing themselves on the familiar movements, making them strange and then, as sport and livelihood grappled and twined, familiar again. _Roll. Pitch. Yaw. In a third-class lever, effort is exerted between the force and the resistance,_ but she had engaged too closely, and her sweeping arm met the resistance of his chest, not the delicate balance of his shoulder. She overbalanced and went down.

A smatter of applause from the kids in the platoon, encamped at the wardroom's other end with a cutthroat and intricate card game spread around them; none from Calli, who looked on with unpossessive pride. Ron could make his body speak with a fluency Mollya could never match, but it was Calli, mute and halting poet with muscle and tongue alike, who had understood when she had said that wrestling helped her with English. "It opens up a space in you," he said, and gave an only casual-seeming shove to Ron's shoulder, just missing the full-blown petals of his grafted rose. "Like where they put the roots in, eh?" 

Mollya nodded, ready, and they grappled again, just as Rydra Wong entered the wardroom. Captain on the deck; it wasn't a saluting ship, but people sat straighter, or nodded. Mollya alone made no acknowledgement; but she was under Ron's arm already when he snapped to near-attention. _A body in motion will tend to remain in motion._ He vectored away from the sudden stillness of her hand, a parabola through space; the trained part of Mollya's mind perceived it as the three-dimensional projection of a four-dimension event, hyperreal as a movie.

"Foul! Captain, that's a foul, isn't it?"

They made easy room for her mat-side. They hadn't seen the captain much in the wardroom of nights, this time out. The Butcher was made as welcome as he would allow, but he did not mingle, and Captain Wong stayed closeted with him—as a new partner, or a good host, or as a fellow veteran of their strange ordeal in Headquarters.

But she smiled, slow and warm and unchanged. "Looked like a fair fall to me." It was two out of three; Ron handed Mollya up, and she rose gracefully, spine uncurling, foot pivoting, and every point between describing an outspiral arc, _orbital breakaway._

"I've never used a personafix," the captain said—perhaps changed after all, to admit the telepathy so easily. "It must be like cryptography, I would think. Or—"

She could not have called the memory into Mollya's head, but there it was, and she knew Captain Wong saw it too: long afternoons in the third-best movie house in Mzuzu watching lushly-colored Egyptian fight-dramas five and six times in a week, until her pocket money ran out. By the third viewing she'd memorized the Swahili titles (or Chichewa, or, rarely, Nyakyusa, which pleased her girlfriends, though she spoke Swahili at home); by the fifth the Arabic words had begun to map, whole sentence by whole sentence, to the meaning.

"Yes," Mollya said, "It was like that."

Calli reached for her chin and studied her face. "It isn't catching," the captain said, needing no telepathy for the assurance. "Any of you ever pick up any Spanish? Out on the Spica run, maybe? You're already on the list, Carlos," she added, and the platoon kids quieted.

A look passed among the triple—Spanish meant the shore party for Nueva Nueva York. Rough city, said Ron's tensed shoulders, eagerly; Calli's narrow eyes said the same thing, but warier. Mollya was still trying to decide what she thought—it was a rough city, that was the one thing anyone knew, but that was the one thing anyone knew, and she thought she might like to know more.

The captain had read her silence, as easily as she had read her husbands'. "What about you, Mollya? _Habla espanol? O parles lingua spania_?" The patois of Spanish and French with Arabic was spoken in neutral way stations all along the Spica frontier. It, and her secondary-school French, were the framework on which her English grammar still hung, an oversized scarecrow garment.

 _"Un poco."_

"Close enough," the captain said. "There's someone I think you should meet. Formally, that is. Or informally—or, actually, intimately might be the better word. As a _tu_ , certainly. Come with me."

Captain Wong led her to the discorporate quarters, though Mollya knew the way. "Anyone can _talk_ to the discorporate without mechanical intermediation. The trick is remembering what they've said to you. But there is a trick—if you can translate it, real-time, into another language, one you don't use often, you can hold onto the translation long enough for it to stick. You'll want the lingua for the shore party, but I'd like you to give it a try with something else. Swahili—or maybe Arabic; if you use a home language it can be hard to tell the translation from your own thoughts. Ear? Have you been listening? I'd like to take you and Eye with us, with Nose back on the ship to monitor the spaceways. Mollya's a cinema fan, too, Ear."

"Oh, since long ago," Mollya answered, though she could not have said what the question was. "I learned Arabic from the movies." Memorizing grand speeches was easy for a child; breaking them down, into words and grammar, was the kind of hard work only a child can do without tiring. She and three girlfriends took it in turns to buy the new month's glossy issue _Cairo Film_. They each kept it for a week's study, the buyer getting it uncreased and pristine (and being smuggled into shows by the others, giggling at the cinema fire exit, having sacrificed her pocket money for the relic.) The same words were there on the page, not six meters high but crabbed and spiderine, with tag-lines called out in sidebars in bold type.

"The alphabet was different, of course, but the posters spelled the actors' names both ways." That was the easy part, that and the excerpted scripts. But reading the interviews was painstaking work, picking out the words she knew from dialog (never enough, never nearly enough, and why couldn't the interviewers ever ask about rayguns or countdowns or dying, dying, dying for love?) and puzzling out the rest.

"Who was my favorite star?" Mollya repeated, and then realized she'd done the trick, the question hanging in Arabic in her memory. "I liked Asma Nour the best. Tough? Oh, yes, but also so _glamorous--_ even hanging from an engine housing and holding a blaster in her teeth." Mollya had been pretty—all her mother's friends said so, though her mother, when questioned, would only say "Who is this vain girl? I did not raise my daughter to be vain. I did not raise a girl who worries about her face when she should worry about her mathematics marks." But prettiness was—perhaps could only be—effortless. Glamour was a skill, one she dedicated a summer to learning, wearing, and finally discarding, like the khimar that Nour wore so much more jauntily than Mollya could.

But while Asma Nour had a team of costumers and makeup artists to arrange every fold of her headdresses, she famously did all her stunts herself. And those were skills—judo, wrestling, strength and balance and resistance—that Mollya learned easily. "Or, that I was more willing to practice." If glamour was beauty made deliberate, learning to grapple and lift and throw had brought Mollya a glamour of motion. "Is it vain, to be proud of that?"

"I don't think so," the Ear said, and then—shyly, Mollya could tell—repeated himself in Swahili, a few words he'd learned since they both joined the crew. But even from English, the translation got easier as they spoke. She had not used Arabic much since her thawing, but in her old life she had shown her favorite films to her first husbands, she and Rene translating for David. She had turned her face into his broad chest to stifle her laughter at his narration of the rapid Egyptian dialog: "I haven't forgotten I have a blaster," in warbling falsetto; "I'm only doing handsprings to buy time! I'll draw and fire when they cut to my stunt double…. any time now… any time... and then I will shoot my agent, and then I will shoot the cameraman who likes my derriere so much, and then—what, Mollya? Is that not what she is saying?"

"You miss them." It was Captain Wong, not the Ear—watching, bemusedly, not pretending she wasn't listening, at least to Mollya's half of the conversation; discorporate entities couldn't broadcast speech.

"Sometimes," said Mollya. "But I have Ron and Calli now, Captain. And I have work. Both thanks to you."

"It's all work," the captain said. That stung, a little; Mollya knew she had not been recalled to life, and to vocation and love, out of charity, but the knowledge made her no less grateful. "Everything worth doing," she added, in apology. "And it's Rydra." But she did not stay to accept the intimacy, swinging up into a hatch to inspect the tell-tale panels.

Mollya and the Ear were left alone. "Is she jealous of us?"

"Not of your triple," the Ear said, and this time the Arabic words stayed, fixed in memory. "Maybe of your work."

"Navigation?"

"This," he said. "Learning a language the hard way."

Mollya thought of the itch of the personafix; the Kiswahili grammar in Ron's quarters, alien patterns imposed on her home tongue by someone who had never learned to think in the language; the unintelligible chatter of the platoon; Calli's prickly impatience with his own untutored speech. "Why should she be jealous?"

"You have a constant source of puzzles. The best kind of work. Why do you think she was so excited about Babel-17? She quit the crypto division because it got boring; now that she's got her telepathy under control there's not a human language left that ~~'~~ would challengeher.

"You are saying that the captain envies me my struggles, because for her they would be only play." Mollya was stern. "That is not a kind thing to say." 

"I'm saying you've got a way to take your mind off your grief, or any heartaches your new triple gives you, that she doesn't, not now that she's done with Babel-17. Poetry is just plain hard work, and she was never interested in linguistic theory for its own sake; in fact I'm pretty sure she slept through most of those classes."  The sensation of a shrug. "I get a lot of time to read these days," the Ear explained. And then a flash of memory, untranslated and fragile—a vivid somatic impression of the Ear's corporate body, linked at the arms with its One and Three, Eye Ear and Nose all rolling with the gait of flesh in gravity.

Even having been dead and frozen, it was easy to forget that the working dead had once had bodies just like her. "How long have you been together? Alive and dead?"

"Thirty years in meat. Going on forty discorporate."

She had had six years with her first husbands.  Calli and Ron had barely been out of the honeymoon when their own wife had died. It showed, she thought: they were ardent, attentive, very much in love with her and each other, but they had not much practice at being married.

If they had been anyone but themselves, she might never have had the patience; but the captain had made a good match.

"Do you miss it?" she asked the ear. "Being alive? Touching them?"

"Who says I don't?" Mollya smiled, unsure and uncaring whether it was her own response, or another ghost of the Ear's. "It takes some luck," he said, "discorporating together. But it's a good way to be dead. I'm really very lucky."

"We all are, I think." Mollya looked up to the access hatch, where the captain sat, feet dangling, contemplative. "Rydra. Thank you for teaching me this."

The captain smiled. "It's a good trick, isn't it?" She vaulted down and took Mollya's arm, more shyly than she had before. She must have heard herself discussed, with ears or mind, but she was not angry. "You're not wrong, Ear." She gave Mollya a rueful look. "And if I ever say I'm bored with poetry, tie me to a chair and make me work, okay?"

"Okay," she agreed; and the Ear said “I’ll hold her to it.”

“I will visit again, Ear, if I may.”

"Any time. Captain, you hold her to that.” The ghost of a wave, friendly and fleeting.

Rydra kept her arm in Mollya's, acknowledgement of an intimacy that had not been there before. Ship life: one could not help overhearing conversations, gossip, all the revealing things that people said that were so hard to forget. Only the captain was, by tradition, immune; but as if in expiation for her gifts of observation, Rydra put herself on the crew's level, a legitimate object of fascination.

Still, Mollya did not ask, _Do you still hope to reunite with the husband who is frozen?_ or _Is the Butcher a partner for now or for ever?_ or _Could you ever have a marriage with just one partner, once you've been tripled?_ They were not easy questions, and, she thought, Rydra must have answered at least some of them, in fixed form. "I have not read your poetry," she said. Rydra Wong had hardly been heard of, when Mollya had suicided; now, her work had been translated into dozens of languages, but it seemed a discourtesy to make do with a translation.

"Well, we've stolen a state-of-the-art ship." Rydra steered them in the opposite direction from the wardroom, toward a plain gray door . "I think the library should have all my books."

"Does it have films, too?" Mollya said. Before planetfall at Nueva Nueva York, perhaps there was time for her to have a movie night with her husbands, to rest her head on Calli's lap and murmur Asma’s great speeches into Ron's ear.  Oh, that could be the start of a fine night…   




"All the greatest hits of the Cairo school." Mollya flushed hot at what the captain might have seen in her mind, but Rydra simply bowed her into the tall narrow room with a magician's flourish, and headed, not for the poetry, but straight for the visual storage media. "That's poetry too, you know—taking the words in someone's head, polishing them up, putting them back in a little better order. And Asma Nour does it while doing high kicks, which is more than I can do."

Or perhaps Mollya would invite the crew: corporate and discorporate, and the captain and her guest as well; and if she repeated a line or two to Ron and Calli in their shared quarters afterwards, no one would judge her for it. "I think you underestimate yourself," she said, deadpan, the first joke she had felt confident enough of her English to attempt.

A heartbeat struck before, to her delight, Rydra turned a mock-stern face down to her and said "Navigator Twa. I know better than to underestimate any member of this crew." 


End file.
